"Unlocking Cities"

Please stop personalizing the discussion.  It is not about me.

Edited by Rill - 29 Dec 2011 at 04:57

For me, Createure's idea is pretty fair. Currently, a player who is totally wiped out just restarts with a 0 pop capitale, and with the research kept; that is not so much help, either a reward of the hard work he brought in the game during so many time.

I personnally lost a great amount of population in this game, and im glad none of my cities were destroyed so i can still develop myself with 9 cities, while i currently really dont have the pop requirements to have these 9 cities. So i truely understand and feel this idea of unlocking cities.
In my opinion, once a player got the gratitude of King Sigurd for his bravour and his talent, and the authorisation to build an other city, he should keep the prestige of this achievement during all his game experience, even if his cities are destroyed.
And anyway, if all of his cities are destroyed, he would have to wait for months before he can settle all of his cities again, as 1 settler takes 4 days to build.

Imo, we could even imagine ghost cities. When a city of a player has been Razed, he could still have that city in his city list, as a ghost city: all the physical structure of that city has been destroyed, but not everyone is dead. These people have the immaterial property of that city, meaning its knowledge and its name. So, following that idea, a player would see his dead cities in his list (0 pop; no location), and would have the option to settle that city where he wants, with no other requirements than waiting for some days. Capitale would still automatically resettle somewhere randomly if all cities were razed. These resettled cities would restart from the dust, but with the research they had when they were wiped out.
With that, losing some cities is still a very hard blow... but i think it would give wiped players some more hope and some more fun. Who would continue to play while being totally razed in the current game conditions? As HM said, only players who have an important place in Illy and many friends would hang around to see how things are going and give some intellectual help... but no much pop rushing for most...





Edited by Mandarins31 - 30 Dec 2011 at 12:37

Something to keep in mind is that if cities were permanently unlocked, then a player could recover a lot faster by capturing 9 cities after sufficiently building up the first to be siege-capable.  It would however still be many months before all those demolished and captured cities were rebuilt, moved, re-focused, etc.  Also, settling cities would take less than 144 days because it wouldn't be (relatively) long after city 2 was founded that it could start producing settlers as well, then city 3 could do the same shortly after that, and so on.  The player could probably have 10 cities founded within 90 days using either tactic.  It would simply still be a very long road or a lot of friendly support+prestige to build those cities up and have a strong empire again.  And there's simply no shortcut to rebuilding high-level commanders, armies, and sovereignty holdings whatsoever.

Edited by HonoredMule - 30 Dec 2011 at 17:59